KIRKUS REVIEW

A superbly qualified
scholar thoroughly deconstructs the tortured story behind the rebuilding of the
World Trade Center complex.

Fundamentally, the
resurrection of the site in Lower Manhattan destroyed by the 9/11 attacks was a
public/private real estate development project, albeit a vast, complicated, and
hugely expensive one. Of course, the traumatic event that necessitated the
rebuilding supercharged the atmosphere surrounding all the decision-makers: a
private, lease-holding developer, New York’s governor, the city’s mayor, and
the Port Authority, the bistate agency that owned the property. These players
and a host of lesser but still formidable participants—world-class architects,
security experts, the victims’ families—all jostled for power, engaged in a
protracted, elaborate game of “pick-up-sticks” where no decision could be made
without affecting something else on the site. An aggressive, opinion-shaping
press looked on. As she maneuvers through the 15-year rebuilding effort,
Sagalyn (Real Estate/Columbia Univ. Business School; Times Square
Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, 2001, etc.) keeps the many strands of
this story expertly in hand: the legal, economic, and commercial realities; the
shifting alliances and balance of power; the political and public relations
dynamics regarding property and contract rights; the interdependencies among
the parties; the clashing egos and ambitions of the scores of principal actors.
Objectively and assuredly, Sagalyn chronicles hundreds of episodes within this
immense story of the messy, sometimes seemingly leaderless rebuilding effort.
From the dry and legalistic but vital issue of whether the leaseholder could
make good on his “two-occurrence” insurance claim to the political controversy
over establishing a cultural presence at the site to the mundane but essential
matters of infrastructure and transportation to the emotionally charged
question of how to display the victims’ names on the panels surrounding
memorial waterfalls on the tower “footprints,” the author neatly handles every
challenge posed by this multidimensional saga.

The narrative’s sheer
bulk will likely intimidate some readers, and that would be a shame, because Sagalyn
has produced a definitive history and an urban studies classic.

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